For all of you bitcoin fanatics who also love MasterCard, some good news arrived this week. MasterCard filed a patent earlier this week that would potentially incorporate bitcoin into its design for a planned global online shopping cart.
Titled ‘Payment Interchange for Use With Global Shopping Cart’ and submitted in March but published on June 19, the patent is yet to be approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
The “payment interchange” would allow for multiple modes of payment, including “non-traditional modes,” which could include bitcoin.
“In accordance with this disclosure, the global shopping cart 300 offers a flexible API framework to accept payments from any number of sources,” the patent read, adding that “the API can also support an interface to accept non-traditional modes or sources of payment such as Amazon virtual currency, paying with rewards points, bitcoin, virtual card numbers, and the like.”
MasterCard has been working hard over the last several months in terms of payment options. In April, PYMNTS.com sat down with MasterCard’s Chief Emerging Payments Officer Ed McLaughlin and discussed the card company’s new HCE (host card emulation), a new software based “payments-enabling capability” that offers a new and secure way to store cardholder credentials.
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